A 15-year-old boy has been acquitted of second-degree murder after a judge said she could not rule out he had feared for his life and acted in self-defence when he fatally stabbed a 36-year-old Garden Hill First Nation man following a party.
“The entire circumstances of this night were unnecessary and tragic,” provincial court Judge Kusham Sharma said as she acquitted the teen Monday. “While I do not condone all of the conduct, I can’t say with certainty he did not act in self-defence.”
Nathan Harper was found dead outside a Garden Hill First Nation home on the morning of April 20, 2023.
He had been stabbed in the stomach, shoulder, head and neck and had suffered 31 “blunt force injuries… not inconsistent with punching and kicking,” Sharma said.
Court was told Harper and the teen were members of rival gangs but did not know each other prior to the killing.
Harper was an uninvited guest whose arrival at the house party caused tension, a male house resident testified at trial.
Court heard evidence Harper had goaded the accused and a friend by grabbing at their gang bandanas.
The male resident testified Harper became angry when he tried to get everyone to leave and started a fight with him.
He said the accused intervened and disarmed Harper of a knife before they both left the house and the resident locked the door.
Sharma said she viewed that evidence with skepticism, saying the 240-pound man “could clearly handle” Harper, who was much smaller, and would not have required the assistance of the 15-year-old boy.
Outside, under circumstances that still remained unclear after trial, Harper and the teen started fighting in what the teen described as a life-or-death struggle for Harper’s knife.
The accused provided a police statement three days after the killing and testified at trial last month. On both occasions, his evidence raised discrepancies, argued prosecutors who urged Sharma to reject his claim of self-defence.
“Given his age, his circumstances, the nature of the offence and that it happened quickly, I would be surprised if there were no inconsistencies,” Sharma said.
The teen testified he and Harper were scrambling on the ground, struggling to reach the knife a few feet away, and he got there first. Harper wouldn’t let go of the teen, so he stabbed him.
“He was still attacking me,” he told court. “I felt scared. He was still attacking me so I stabbed him again. He wouldn’t let me go so I did the same thing.”
The teen said Harper continued to grab at him, even after he had stabbed the man in the abdomen, at which point a friend intervened and kicked Harper in the head, bringing the fight to an end.
Sharma said she had “problems” with some of the teen’s testimony, including his assertion he was mainly responsible for the injuries inflicted on Harper.
The teen had no visible injuries following the incident, aside from some redness to his face, while Harper had multiple fresh bruises and scrapes.
Harper’s injuries “tell a story more consistent with the deceased being involved in a fight with more than just one person, at least before the stabbing took place,” Sharma said.
However Harper and the teen came to be on the ground, Sharma said she could not say in those circumstances the teen did not fear for his life.
“Despite all the difficulties with the accused’s evidence, based on the evidence before me and the evidence that is not, I find his version of what happened when he stabbed the deceased could be true.”
dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Dean Pritchard
Courts reporter
Dean Pritchard is courts reporter for the Free Press. He has covered the justice system since 1999, working for the Brandon Sun and Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in 2019. Read more about Dean.
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